Installing Node.js on Windows IoT

Posted on 20th January 2017

Windows IoT is a lightweight version of Windows built for Internet of Things devices such as Raspberry Pi and MinnowBoard. The JavaScript Engine in Windows IoT is the ChakraCore Engine which is optimized to run efficiently on Windows IoT. Node.js is built on Google's V8 JavaScript Engine which does not run on Windows IoT on ARM devices. Node.js on ChakraCore is a project that is currently in progress to enable Node.js to run with ChakraCore JavaScript Engine.

ChakraCore is the open source JavaScript engine from Microsoft and is embedded in Microsoft's Edge browser. ChakraCore comes with a two-tier Just-In-Time compiler that generates highly optimized machine code, a Garbage collector that supports concurrent and partial collections,
and also JavaScript Runtime (JSRT) APIs which allows integrating more applications with ChakraCore.To learn more about ChakraCore follow this link - ChakraCOre Architecture Overview

Nightly builds of Node.js on ChakraCore are available for download from this link here. Download the zip file for ARM architecture and extract it. The release zip file normally contains two files node.exe and chakracore.dll. Copy these two files to a suitable location in your Window IoT device and add that location to your environment PATH variable. To verify the installation, run